That's his opinion, but to compare a "Mostly PvE MMO" with a "Full PvP MOBA", I think that's kinda odd...

But I think his "everyone can't not see everything gives the feeling of a endless game" comment is quite....questionable....I mean, it's why I prefer more the current WoW than the old one...that just gives me the feeling WoW was not a game but a sort of "other life".

I mean, only few players could see most of WoW contains and the "majority" one (who couldn't make a raid for some reason) was just able to......dream?
To just droll on full epic character boots and Raid videos on Youtube?

I'm sorry but I think is kinda....weird and frustating...Especially after 2 years on Vanilla...
Don't get me wrong, I like when my games give me some challenges, I like gain rewards by myself, Godmod is fun ten minutes,etc.. but I continue to believe It's f***** game!! Not a virtual form of current life with constraints and hard choices...

I think its a foolish opinion to think that any content in the game needs to feel "exclusive".

WoW is an MMO, not a secret university club like the Skulls. For every one man that feels warm and fuzzy from being part of "whatever it is that's exclusive", I can guarantee 10 others look inside from out, get pissed off, and leave.

You must show no mercy, Nor have any belief whatsoever in how others judge you: For your greatness will silence them all! -Warrior Wisdom

I really disagree with the PoV that endgame raid content needs to be exclusionary.

The first MMO I ever played was final fantasy 11. Final Fantasy 11, back when the level cap was 75, made vanilla wow look like a diet-MMO or fat free MMO. Talk about exclusionary content, monsters on 21-24 hr respawn timers taking 18-35+ people to down on the fly. Massive raids with bosses that kill 80% of the raid using a 2-hour ability. That game was hardcore.

I was an above average player clearing 80% of the end game content. I really wanted to take on bosses like the jailer of love or absolute virtue; however, I had peaked. I was only ever going to be above average and not exceptional. I also did not have the time to put into the game that most exceptional players had. I was never going to down bosses like jailer of love or absolute virtue. Knowing I was never going to reach that level or join those guilds (linkshells) that were at such levels started to kill my passion for the game. Eventually, I just quit playing due to burnout of trying to get to that last bit of content I could not see.

People reach a plateau and they don't want to hone their skills anymore. For some, that plateau is heroic raiding, for others, it is dungeons. Most of us plateau between those two points. I think wow strikes a nice balance with 3 difficulties (soon to be 4). People should get some bang for their buck.

I always like to pose a question to my angst-filled guild mates. If development dollars/time allocation was based off of the percent of players that participated, how many raid tiers do you think would be put out per expansion? Based off of statements from blues, I would estimate that percent to be less than 15.

The game no longer has any logical carrot on a stick for players to chase.

This could be true. Wow has less of a journey than it once had, but putting the journey or "the carrot on the stick" back into Wow doesn't have to mean creating content only 1% of the community will access. People loved Vanilla because it was new and people loved BC because it released tons of content (zones, dungeons, raids, arena etc.). Saying, 'people loved vanilla or BC because they couldn't access content' makes no sense.

Mr. Morello is an expert on LOL, not Wow. Greg Street is an expert on Wow and I doubt he knows what Wow needs. If he did, Wow wouldn't be bleeding subs. Experts have opinions that are wrong and can make bad decisions. Being a lead designer doesn't make everything you say true.

Well that's his perspective and that drives the philosophy behind his game, which is why I'm glad there are many games out there today appealing to different audiences. TBC was a sweetspot for me too, but I can never say this enough: I wouldn't go back. If WoW were still TBC, I simply wouldn't be playing. TBC was many years ago, all of us who played then are years older now, and for the most part the game has changed to reflect very well how its players have changed.

Speaking of long-term engagement, I've been playing since January of 2006, more than seven years. Many players have been playing even longer than that. So clearly the WoW teams design philosophy vis-a-vis long term engagement isn't wrong (at least not completely), it's just different, and different games will appeal to different players.

I would go back. I read the whole screenshot and he summarized everything i didn't know i needed. Now that i look back on TBC and vanilla the game DID seem huge and endless, every moment spent in it gave the impression that i was climbing huge stairs and when looking up, i saw the mists of the unknown and of huge potential adventure. I guess the lack of datamining helped allot as well. They should make datamining against the rules. This isn't an RTS or FPS, it's supposed to be a world of unknown.

Having feminists design female characters for your game is like asking the Klan to design black characters for your game. At best, you will get mediocrity, at worst downright ugly characters.

Read the argument again. Burning Crusade was losing subscriptions at the normal rate, but it was gaining subscriptions at a huge pace because the game was new and exciting and a lot of people hadn't played World of Warcraft yet. That's what made the game grow all the way to Wrath of the Lich King. At 12 million subscriptions (which probably meant at least 15-18 million people had tried it at some point) World of Warcraft became big enough to start to deplete its pool of potential new players, which made it difficult to recoup the losses from player attrition. Specially after the fiasco that was Cataclysm's "let's get people to use crowd control!" heroic dungeon system early on.

Why do people think that player pool is dried up? Gaming has become more accepted over the years so older players are getting in to games and as kids grow up, they get in to gaming more than ever now with how accepted it is at a lower age level. Gaming as a whole is bigger than its ever been with numbers of people doing it and how much coverage it gets. There is no reason for "we are out of players" to be an excuse.

I'm sure most people to this day still try WoW at some point who have an interest in gaming, they just don't stay around because of how the game is now.

I would go back. I read the whole screenshot and he summarized everything i didn't know i needed. Now that i look back on TBC and vanilla the game DID seem huge and endless, every moment spent in it gave the impression that i was climbing huge stairs and when looking up, i saw the mists of the unknown and of huge potential adventure. I guess the lack of datamining helped allot as well. They should make datamining against the rules. This isn't an RTS or FPS, it's supposed to be a world of unknown.

Don't read the datamined information then? Don't watch streams or play on the PTR either while we are at it. AND for the love of god... don't use LFR... its just mind numbing and it removes the feeling of achieving any kind of goal once you finish it

Sub numbers rose during BC when raid content was exclusive, but they rose even faster during WotLK when raid content was the most inclusive and accessible its ever been. Sub numbers began to fall for the first time in Cataclysm when content was made exclusive again (pre-LFR). They have continued to fall in MOP where Normal raiding remains exclusive while average players are granted the possibility of seeing content via LFR.

I don't think we can determine causality though. There are too many other factors. We also don't have any other game of its size/kind to compare it to, so any explanation for drop in subs is really just speculation.

He can give his opinion on the best recipe for Sangria if he wants to. I'm just saying that the fact that he does the exact opposite of what he says is good game design makes his opinion worth less than a random forum poster.

I just want to point out that this line of thinking is rubbish.

There is no comparison between League and WoW. They are two completely different genres that have completely different formulas for success.

My two cents on Morello's post: I agree, on the whole. As a few other people have said already, he sees things from a perspective I didn't have, and I respect his input. It was logical and rang true to me. The game is missing something now that it had in the past.

I don't care about exclusive content or not, but I would like some content to strive for. Personally, I don't believe that Blizzard is at fault for this, but the community.

I know my place in WoW. I am a decent player who can handle a challenge. I know that I don't belong in a top progressive guild, but I am capable of running normals and even heroics after a nerf or when i get better gear for the content.

The problem is not the raiding, but finding 10 like minded people who's schedule's work out. I don't believe that I hold high standards, but I look for a few key qualities in a group, which is hard to find.

1. This is a game, I am here to have fun.
2. I don't mind wiping, but we need to learn from our mistakes.
3. I don't care about gear. I just want to pew pew internet dragons.
4. If you are not in a progressive raiding group, then I am not applying to your guild and pretending to be a progressive raider.
5. Once the group is established, I expect consistent attendance.
6. To reiterate, have fun, and be willing to learn (myself included).

The problems I run into, is that often raiders:
1. drama - either over personality or over gear/cosmetics
2. ego - and this is probably the BIGGEST turn-off. I can't tell you how many guilds out there are ranked 2,000+ who think they are hardcore progressive raiders
3. not being committed - you need consistent raiding and if one or three people do not show up on a consistent basis, then it wrecks havoc, especially on low to medium populated servers.

Personally, I think the LFD was one of the best implemented features in this game. It did what exactly it was supposed to do - make the content more accessible to people. Why? The community. The community was filled with elitist assholes who would spam trade-chat for hours looking for overgreared players to run heroic 5-mans. All Blizzard tried to do was correct for a community problem.

Now, do I think that they took it took far to make heroics, LFR, and scenarios face-roll easy? Absolutely.

Sub numbers rose during BC when raid content was exclusive, but they rose even faster during WotLK when raid content was the most inclusive and accessible its ever been. Sub numbers began to fall for the first time in Cataclysm when content was made exclusive again (pre-LFR). They have continued to fall in MOP where Normal raiding remains exclusive while average players are granted the possibility of seeing content via LFR.

I don't think we can determine causality though. There are too many other factors. We also don't have any other game of its size/kind to compare it to, so any explanation for drop in subs is really just speculation.

You are so wrong it is amazing. Wrath started, ie TBC ended, with 11.5 million players. There are huge posts about it all over the place. The HIGHEST the population got during Wrath was a touch over 12 million. Wrath gained at most 1 million players, at most and that is a generous number.

I didn't mind wrath, miuns ToC and different items 10/25s. I would love to see it come back. I would just love TBC back more.

He shares most of my thoughts, if not mirror them exactly. But his opinion on the matter and views upon it have been apparent and well known for awhile now. I don't see how anyone who hasn't followed WoW and what made the past more successful when compared to the present didn't see his view. Maybe I took it for granted since I follow a lot of these threads myself.

"Your name was stolen? I see... Well, I guess that happens from time to time..."

I'm not sure I agree with him. I think successful games generally have a range of difficulties that suit a wide range of people. Games that are too hard will have few players because they cant finish them or even do them at all. Games that are too easy are boring, completed too quickly, and discarded. Those levels are different for everyone so to keep everyone playing there has to be more difficulty levels.

The difficulty levels in BC were just different. They were leveling, dungeons, and raids. Now its LFR,normal raids, heroic raids since raiding has taken over as the perceived representation of the game. And theres content that is more exclusive now than raiding was in TBC: heroic raids.

So Wrath, successful, many raid difficulties(after Ulduar which had 10 and 25 mode HMs) 10man, 25man, 10 heroic, 25 heroic.
Cata, not so great, not as many difficulties: normal, hard and the new LFR basically saved the expansion

I agree somewhat about whether to listen to the players about what they want or not. A lot of the time people don't say what they want but something else or they don't even know what they want. Using data to see them show what they do or like in the game might be better than reading forums.

The problem is not raids its guilds. Guilds are what hinder raiding, guilds are what get in the way of end game pve. Guilds are a pointless division; they should exist as a social vehicle, but have been turned into exclusive clubs with cliques inside them on top of it. A clique of 8 really good buddies and 17 other people dragging them to what they want and getting some handouts along the way is what a lot of these 25 guilds are. Thats why they started becoming an endangered species when those 17 others said "f u" to the exclusive 8 and made their own 10s teams, and didn't give a crap about what the buddy club did beyond that. BC model would work better if you didn't have so many people excluding play because of their bloody guild demanding they don't mingle with anyone else when it came to things like attunements. But Blizz went a diff direction, opened things up to everyone independent of guilds and overall thats a good thing.